A watchful eye on our most precious resource

By Celeste Dodge, MS, Systems Ecologist

Water returns to the landscape at
Pepperwood's Weimar Falls

Water is the driving force behind ecosystems, determining which plants can thrive and what types of habitat they can provide for animals. In Mediterranean climates like Northern California’s, the extreme shift in seasonal water availability is largely to thank for the incredible amount of biodiversity we enjoy, as many species have adapted to our region’s unique climatic conditions. As much needed rainfall is only just beginning to alleviate a historic drought, we are reminded of how delicate this water balance truly is.

Pepperwood is studying the relationship between water availability and vegetation so our region's land and water managers can better prepare for what is expected to be a more arid future for California. The work we are conducting at our preserve gives organizations like the Sonoma County Water Agency and the US Geological Survey key data on not just variations in weather, but also how our soils, plants and animals are responding to these changing conditions. 

Volunteers learn how to collect data from rain gauges

As part of our Sentinel Site monitoring network, Pepperwood is expanding our capacity to measure water on our preserve.  We now have a team of 20 volunteers monitoring 21 rain gauges at remote locations across the preserve, with the goal of improving the span and accuracy of our rainfall monitoring. Four of the rain gauges are located at weather stations in Martin Creek, Double Ponds, Rogers Canyon and at Bechtel house. Rain gauges at these stations will help improve the accuracy of existing electronic rain sensors called tipping bucket gauges, which are susceptible to underestimating rainfall amounts, particularly during high intensity storms.

Pepperwood's TBC3 team discussing best 
practices for monitoring soil moisture

The other 17 of these rain gauges are located at a selection of our 50 long term forest monitoring plots. Installed by the UC Berkeley Ackerly Lab, these plots span the preserve and allow us to track key indicators of forest health including growth rates of both young and mature trees within the plots. This biological data is analyzed alongside climate data collected at the same plots so we can determine the effects of long term climate trends and extreme weather events—like the recent drought—on plant life.

By recording rainfall under the canopy at the forest monitoring plots, we are getting a pretty good sense of the environmental conditions experienced by seedlings in our forests. Total rainfall at these site varies by as much as 40% and is controlled by both canopy and topographic effects. At one site where there are particularly strong canopy effects, the rainfall we have measured thus far amounts to only 20% of the rainfall out our wettest location. We may decide to move our forest plot gauges out from under the canopy to a nearby grassland area to better understand the effects of topography alone next season. This will also make our data more valuable to forecasters. A nationwide citizen science project called the Community Collaborative Rain Hail and Snow Network collects backyard rain gauge data along these lines and uses it retroactively to improve weather models.

Systems Ecologist Celeste Dodge with a leaf wetness sensor

In addition to the new rain gauges, some of the forest monitoring plots are already equipped with instruments that collect data on leaf wetness, temperature, and humidity. Data from these instruments is relayed across the preserve by a wireless mesh network, a series of antennas that transmit across the preserve to a central computer.

A mesh network sensor at a forest monitoring plot

But measuring the amount of rain that falls is only one piece of the puzzle. We also need to determine what happens when it hits the ground. Pepperwood is one of only four sites in the entire Bay area equipped with soil moisture probes, which allow us to gain vital insights into the amount of water available to plants in the soil throughout the year. We currently have two sets of probes installed, and our goal is to install 10 sets of probes at two depths at our mesh network antennas before this year's spring dry-down occurs. This will give us a better sense of the heterogeneity of the preserve's hydrology, and will enable forecasters to better predict potential flood or mudslide events.

Pepperwood’s ever-expanding Sentinel Site monitoring work is generating a wealth of data to help our region’s land and water managers better prepare for the climate challenges that lay ahead.

Our green season of renewal

By Lisa Micheli, PhD, President & CEO

February 6, 2016

You ask me why I dwell in the green mountain; 

I smile and make no reply for my heart is free of care. 

  

Li Po (701–762)

   

Views from Sonoma Valley.

The other day I was driving the gorgeous route from home to Pepperwood and taking in the views of the Mayacamas Mountains from the floor of the Sonoma Valley. Suddenly, I found my heart overflowing with gratitude-at first for apparently no reason—and then I realized the cause: gratefulness for green!  After four long years of drought and parched hillsides, we actually had gotten enough rain to start sprouting grass seeds laying in wait below ground.

A new generation of green finally had the power to push up through the gray thatch of previous seasons’ growth.  A deep sense of relaxation and relief was palpable throughout my entire body. How thankful I am that we’ve gotten enough rain to shift our hills from dismal gray to vitally verdant!

As I learn ever more about the terrestrial (land-based) ecosystems of our Mediterranean region, I have a greater and greater appreciation for the regenerative power of our winter rainy season.  For some organisms, like showy forest species and plants that bloom, this season is “downtime.” 

Soil microbes

However, for the practically invisible billions of micro-organisms—including bacteria and fungi—that inhabit just a single gram of soil, the cool wet season is when they get to work breaking down organic matter to turn it into nutrients for our pioneering grass seed sprouts!  They are largely the architects of our local soil’s structure and fertility.

One effect of climate change we are realizing may come to pass is shorter and warmer winter wet seasons in our region.  Shorter winters could actually reduce the productivity of these subterranean beings and in turn impact the health of our soils.

Preserve Manager Michael Gillogly uses a "flamer" to control weeds

Meanwhile, ecologists are working above ground at Pepperwood to use the winter season to prepare our grasslands for a growth spurt once the rains get going. One of our goals is to give our perennial native plants an advantage relative to the invasion of European annual grasses brought to feed livestock imported to the “new world.”

One way we try to help native plants is to do our best to remove or at least hinder the spread of annual grasses and invasive weeds. One of the more dramatic techniques is using a “flamer,” a small hand-held torch, to knock back weeds (see photo of Preserve Manager Michael Gillogly using the flamer on a restoration site near our red barn).

Facilities Assistant Sonja Barringer in our new shade house

Once we have treated a site with a weed removal treatment, in some key locations we actually plant baby native grasses and forbs. We have just increased our capacity to hatch native grass starts thanks to the generosity of the Giles W. and Elise G. Mead Foundation, who sponsored the construction of a greenhouse for this purpose at Pepperwood.  Below you can see our Facilities Assistant Sonja Barringer in her element nurturing our latest crop of plan starts, sprouted from seeds carefully collected by our awesome Pepperwood volunteers.

With some timely management, we can help maintain native plant communities and enable the wildlife they support to thrive!

Stepping inside the Valley Fire burn zone: Our Boggs Mountain field trip

A Pepperwood Fire Mitigation and Forest Health Initiative update.

By Lisa Micheli, PhD, President & CEO

Team Pepperwood at Boggs Mountain rocking the hard hats:
Michael Gillogly, Lisa Micheli, and Sophia Porter 

When Michael and Sophia and I finally reached the severe burn zone, it was kind of like stepping in to the cartoon world of Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas, with slender ebony black branchless trunks clawing at the sky.  The foresters tried to break us in easy on this Boggs State Research Forest tour, including Nick Kent of CalFire and Fred Euphrat who is an instructor at Santa Rosa Jr. College and currently advising Pepperwood on our forest management planning process. 

We met at the Boggs Mountain CalFire forest station, which had been an island of firefighting activity during the onset of the Valley Fire less than two months ago, before the guys who worked there put up their “white flags” and had to get helicoptered out.  The station itself survived and was in a zone of relatively low burn severity. While some of the trees showed sign of char from the flames, the ground itself was covered with recently dropped pine needles which draped a soft looking sepia carpet over whatever scorched soils lay beneath.  

Field map of burn zone, fire severity, Boggs boundary,
and remaining live trees.

At the station they showed us a map of the burn zone marked in pink to dark reds, with the darker the red showing increasingly greater burn intensity.  Green dots showed the survivors, living trees the foresters hoped would provide some of the seed needed for forest regeneration.  But right now the urgency is on identifying the dead trees, and getting them out of the forest for a couple of reasons—to reduce future fuel loads, to make way for new plantings, and perhaps even to help fund restoration.  They do leave 5% of the dead trees behind for habitat, with dead wood known as excellent habitat for cavity-nesting birds and other critters.

Forester showing how to expose cambium and
example of healthy indicators despite scorched bark.

The way the foresters can tell whether a tree is alive or dead is by taking an axe to its base and taking off about 1 inch or more of the bark in order to expose the cambium* underneath. The cambium seemed rather akin to our own fatty layer, lying just beneath the skin of the tree, and containing cells that are in charge of growth (see the more technical definition below).  We learned that if it is white and firm that’s an indicator of life, but if it’s gooey and caramel colored, the tree is likely a goner.  So this has been a big focus of the immediate post-fire efforts on the state forest, to identify live and dead trees in order to cull out the dead.

Don Lindsay of California’s Geologic Survey showed us the water quality/sediment runoff study sites that are being installed at multiple locations to measure how much soil erodes this winter off of the forest floor.  This is really important given we are in an El Niño season that could bring heavy rains! Will the more severely burned areas shed more soil than the less severely burned areas?  Lindsay’s study (in partnership with university researchers) will create controlled study sites where literally all of the sediment coming out of a small drainage (1-2 acres) uphill will be captured and measured.  They will also measure the amount of incoming rain and water coming off the sites using a rain gauge plus a small dam and water depth measurement setup. (See photo below). It’s exciting to know they are collecting this critical data and it’s also clearly a lot of work.  Don has been hustling to get the sediment traps installed before the onset of the rainy season.

Don Lindsay of Cal Geological Survey showing a water quality
monitoring setup.

Eerie shape left where a living tree stump used to be.

When they finally took us into the severely burned area, it was like stepping into a charcoal landscape.  The trees were shiny and metallic, with their bark looking in some ways more like stone then wood. The stones that were burned were shedding their fried outer layers (called spalling**).  There were shadows of branches where all that was left was oxidized rust colored minerals streaked across the black earth.  We found more than one reverse tree stump, where the earth was essentially sculpted by the negative space of a tree vaporized by the heat (see photo below).  Where the soils have experienced great heat, often at the intersection of rock or root, Fred showed us how hydrophobic*** (or water repellent) the soils were by pouring water out from a drinking bottle to show us how it pooled up and refused to sink in.  This means even though the soils are extremely stressed by drought, one of the lasting effects of the fire will be to cause more runoff than normal for at least this winter. 

Someone in our group started to observe that beetle activity was already evident on the burned trees, including tiny little piercings on the bark surface and some kind of extruded waste collecting at the bottom of the tree which was oddly a light pink-orange color.  With the threat of bug infestations helping to take out what’s left, starting next spring the foresters will focus intently on planting new trees, and apparently a range of planting techniques will be designed and tested at Boggs Mountain State Forest.  On the way out we saw many signs of miraculous life coming back on its own: a bracken fern that had pushed up through the charcoal soils, and this fresh oak shoot coming off a fried stump. I thank Nick and Fred for hosting us and I look forward to visiting again next spring to help track the recovery of the site!

Oak re-sprout—life carries on!

*The vascular cambium is a plant tissue located between the xylem and the phloem in the stem and root of a vascular plant, and is the source of both the secondary xylem growth (inwards, towards the pith) and the secondary phloem growth (outwards to the bark). It is a cylinder of unspecialized meristem cells that divide to give new cells which then specialize to form secondary vascular tissues.

** Spall are flakes of a material that are broken off a larger solid body and can be produced by a variety of mechanisms. Spalling and spallation both describe the process of surface failure in which spall is shed.


*** Hydrophobic is repelling, tending not to combine with, or incapable of dissolving in water.

Launching the Fire Mitigation and Forest Health Initiative

A Pepperwood Fire Mitigation and Forest Health Initiative update.

By Lisa Micheli, PhD, President & CEO

On October 3, 2015, Pepperwood launched its Fire Mitigation and Forest Health Initiative at its anniversary celebration and first ever fundraiser thanks to an outpouring of support by the community.  

The objective of this initiative is to integrate multiple threads of Pepperwood’s applied science and management activities into one unified approach to forest health.  Our goal is to demonstrate best practices on the preserve and to leverage Pepperwood’s role in research, outreach, collaborations, and technical advising to expand these throughout our region.  

One of the many beautiful oak woodlands found at Pepperwood.

Here are just a few of the exciting developments kicked off since our launch.

• Pepperwood’s Mayacamas Forum to host spring convening on fire mitigation and forest health in partnership with Bureau of Land Management (BLM). We are in the planning stages of a workshop with BLM to bring together our researchers and experts to share and advance the multiple threads of this initiative.


• Pepperwood engaged in White House Office of Science and Technology Policy’s Climate Resilience Project and presenting at their hosted session at the American Geophysical Union (AGU)'s Fall Meeting. Pepperwood’s Dr. Lisa Micheli has been invited to present on December 14th in the White House’s session on Linking Climate Resources for Community Resilience where she will present her Climate Ready work on links between drought and fire.


• Pepperwood raises awareness of connections between fire and drought via Climate Ready North Bay. In its role as the science lead on the California Coastal Conservancy-funded Climate Ready North Bay vulnerability assessment for Marin, Sonoma, Mendocino, and Napa counties, Pepperwood is applying a statewide model that estimates the increase in fire risk associated with climate change for the benefit of our regional county water, parks, and open space districts long-term planning.


• Pepperwood selected to advise the North Coast Resource Partnership (NCRP) on climate, hydrology, fire and forest health. The NCRP, which serves coastal counties from Sonoma to the Oregon border, has chosen Pepperwood and it’s USGS Terrestrial Biodiversity Climate Change Collaborative (TBC3) partners to extend our Climate Ready North Bay approach throughout their region, thanks to funding from the Regional Growth Council, to support long-term sustainability planning.


• Pepperwood completes this year’s installment of fuels reduction on the preserve. A significant portion of Pepperwood’s annual stewardship budget is focused on removing thickets of young trees that in previous times would have been cleared via native peoples’ prescribed burns or natural wildfires. These young fir saplings create a dangerous level of fuel loading. This fall Pepperwood cleared over 12 more acres of accumulated fuels in concert with our partners at Great Tree Tenders and our dedicated volunteers.


• Pepperwood has partnered with CalFire to develop a five year plan for comprehensive fuel reductions. We will work directly with CalFire experts to develop a diverse array of prescriptions aimed at reducing accumulated fuels in the forest understory across the entire preserve. By making this a joint project with California’s lead fire management agency, this planning process will entail securing the permits and clearances needed to move forward with a more comprehensive, long-term approach.


• Native American advisor joins Pepperwood’s adaptive forest management team. Thanks to the generosity of the Christensen Fund, Pepperwood has been able to officially add our Native American cultural advisor, Clint McKay, to our adaptive management team. We have already gained a valuable long-term perspective on our landscape thanks to Clint’s generosity, and we’re only at the beginning of this process.


• Pepperwood awarded California Forest Improvement Program grant to develop adaptive forest management plan. Pepperwood was successful in securing a grant to hire a professional forester to advise us on all aspects of long-term management of our forest resources. We are working with Fred Euphrat, Registered Forester, who also serves as the Professor of Forestry for Santa Rosa Junior College.


• Santa Rosa Junior College students are learning forestry at Pepperwood. Our partnership with SRJC’s Forestry Professor has also created a wonderful opportunity for SRJC students to gain valuable career experienced by assisting in Pepperwood’s forest inventory, and in the process, further strengthen Pepperwood’s long-term partnership with SRJC. We hope this can become an annual learning opportunity for our local natural resource management students.


• Pepperwood advancing forest and fire research with UC Berkeley. In addition to our now multi-year forest ecology monitoring partnership with UC Berkeley’s Ackerly lab (Department of Integrative Biology), Pepperwood has a new partnership with Professor Scott Stephens’ Wildland Fire Science lab (Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management). We are exploring an experimental design and monitoring plan for small prescribed fire test plots at Pepperwood perhaps as soon as next summer or fall.

With your help, we have already made great strides in launching our Fire Mitigation and Forest Health Initiative. Thank you so much for your support!

Stay tuned to our monthly e-newsletter and Pepperwood’s Field Notes blog for future updates.  

Click here if you want to check out Lisa’s latest blog piece on visiting the Valley Fire burn zone.

Mayacamas Christmas Bird Count for Kids

Practicing with binoculars before heading out.
Photo © Sandi Funke.

By TeenNat interns Emma and Ben Hoffman

Every December, Pepperwood, Safari West, and the Petrified Forest all come together to host the Mayacamas Christmas Bird Count For Kids. The bird count involves going out to one of the three properties and counting and identifying all of the bird species we see, then uploading the information to an online database.

So why do we go out and count all the birds we see? It’s because bird populations are changing in response to habitat loss and climate change. By counting the number of birds and the species in a given area, we give scientists data to track bird populations and see what’s going on—whether there’s trouble coming, if a species is rebounding, if territories are changing, etc.

Getting a closer look through a spotting scope.
Photo © Sandi Funke.

Everyone who wants to participate in the bird count gathers each year at one of the aforementioned properties—this year it was Pepperwood. Several expert birders taught everyone how to use binoculars and bird guides, then divided everyone into three groups. An expert or two was on every team to aid in correct identification. The goal of the day was to find the most birds, but we also wanted accuracy. 

One team wandered twisty trails of Pepperwood, another searched the wilds of Safari West, and my team explored the woody Petrified Forest. In my group we went through several biomes, watching all the time for movement in the trees, bushes and grass, and listening for calls that might show where a bird was. One person in the group was designated as the counter—they tallied all the species and number of birds per species that we spotted.

Nicole Barden, Pepperwood Environmental Educator and expert
birder, helps confirm bird identification. Photo © Sandi Funke.

After everyone was done gathering data, we all returned to Pepperwood where we turned in the data and the experts compiled it into one single Excel page. In the end, there was a total of 54 species and 928 birds counted. 

My favorite part was that at the end we got to add our data to the collection of hundreds of bird counts all happening at the same time on ebird.org. There were people all around the world participating, and we got to see the data of our day added to the ever growing pool of information. Scientists are now using the information we collected to study migration and population changes in the species we counted.

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Join us for the next Mayacamas Christmas Bird Count for Kids on Saturday, January 16, 2016! Click here to sign up or learn more.

Harvest Reflection: Camaraderie is a key to scientific collaboration

By Lisa Micheli, PhD, President & CEO, written on September 15, 2015

It is a pitch black harvest morning at 5 AM and I find myself in the Sonoma Safeway at the Starbucks counter trying to calculate how much coffee I can safely transport to the Bechtel House via Prius without spillage. I am headed up to Pepperwood to meet some of our incredible TBC3 scientists - who all arrived the night before to share a nice sunset dinner on our deck overlooking the incredible view. We are prepping for a full day of Sentinel Site work, complete with a field excursion to dig a soil pit. The field trip requires an early departure due to the threat of hundred degree temperatures by midday. I get the most sugary doughnuts I can find and carry them out to my car with several pints of hot coffee.

This is a great day at Pepperwood. This particular group of folks, which includes my TBC3 co-chair David Ackerly of UC Berkeley, Alicia Torregrosa and Alan and Lorrie Flint of the US Geological Survey, and Stu Weiss of Creekside Earth Observation - the mastermind behind the Bay Area’s Conservation Lands Network. Who wouldn't get up early to secure stimulants for this brilliant crew!? I want to arrive in time for the breakfast window which often is the most creative, with people freshly out of their tents watching the sunrise, some still in jammies, cracking open their laptops and brainstorming hypotheses about how our natural world works. This is how great interdisciplinary science happens - unless, of course, you are out of coffee.

The TBC3 team visiting a weather station on the preserve.

Well-caffeinated and doughnut-powered, we leave the Dwight Center after a brief strategy session to hoof it to one of David’s long-term forest monitoring research sites on the preserve. There, next to the newly installed wireless weather station, is a square hole in the ground about a foot plus on each side. Many of us got down on all fours to peer inside this soil pit that Pepperwood’s Celeste Dodge had dug by hand. We actually determined that since the soils were so thin Celeste had actually dug more than a foot into the bedrock -highly weathered bedrock - but bedrock after all. (And she had done it in the hundred degree heat of the day before: we were impressed.)

In peering into the hole from close-up we all discover something different through that window into the skin of the earth. We notice the influence of roots on potential water flow pathways, evidence of burrowing animals stirrings the strata up, and the wildly variable conditions just a few feet away in this hummocky forest landscape. This complexity and diversity is thought-provoking but working against our desire to rapidly generate statistically-significant field measurements of the soil hydraulic properties across David’s tennis court-sized field plot. The more the variability, the more pits Celeste will have to dig to get a valid average. That's how statistics works.

So what is the story the soil pit tells? First of all, it’s darn dry. There isn't one iota of moisture evident below the earth’s surface in the midst of California’s worst drought in centuries. The soils are only about 7 inches thick, but below is a layer of deeply weathered porous rhyolite capable of storing great amounts of moisture. This actually what is keeping this patch of forest alive - a secret water cache deep below where our spade can reach-something we would not know without digging this hole in the ground. Lorrie rips out a clod and pours some water on the light gray rhyolite material that absorbs the liquid right up - not exactly the behavior you’d expect of a rock.

The soil protocol we planned to use assumes much deeper soils than we are finding, so we debate how to adjust our sampling strategy to handle that. (We love standardized protocols but in nature rarely do they work everywhere!) We also brainstorm how we can we use our map data to estimate how variable the soil thickness may be across all of David’s sites to minimize how many of these pits Celeste will have to dig. Solutions to these sampling questions are never perfect due to the complexity we find everywhere we look in nature - but they do have to be internally consistent!

Too late, perhaps my most important amateur botanical observation of the day is that we are holding this discussion in a deceptively leafless patch of poison oak. Upon return we are joined by the new executive director of the Laguna the Santa Rosa Foundation, where several TBC3 scientists have also worked. In my hostess’ haste I forget to do my usual Technu rubdown post hike-normally a ritual since as a non-native I am wildly allergic to poison oak. I think I am out of the woods, so to speak, but now I write this with a few bubbles on eyelid, arm and knee to prove that plants can be smarter than people. The toxic oils apparently traveled right through my field pants. (“Oh those tricky plants” as Pepperwood’s Preserve Ecologist Michelle Halbur likes to say.)

But today I wear my poison oak as a badge of honor, proof that this mostly desk-bound scientist still can make it into the field with dear colleagues who share a keen desire to understand the relationships between water, earth, sun and life.  I am reassured that in this age of technology humans observing nature directly remains the ultimate source of our knowledge and inspiration. And, at the end of the day, as the first sprinkles of fall rain try to slake the earth’s deep thirst, I am reminded that really meaningful collaborations are always sustained by the joys of camaraderie.

TeenNat Fern Research

Amanda Yarger (left) points to a data sheet
(Photo by Richard Morgenstein) 

By Amanda Yarger, TeenNat Intern

June 23, 2015

TeenNat is an internship program for teens offered by Pepperwood. Each week of this internship has a different emphasis. During one week of TeenNat, we researched redwoods and ferns. We were researching how ferns affect redwoods and how the ferns themselves are changing. Specifically, we were doing research on sword ferns. We were researching how the drought has affected the ferns and redwoods.

Amanda takes a picture
(photo by Richard Morgenstein)

TeenNat interns in Pepperwood's redwood forest
(photo by Deborah Zeirten)

Before I started working with the ferns, I knew nothing about them. Learning about ferns and how they affect the redwoods was a great experience. We were assigned random plots and we cataloged the ferns in each plot. We counted the number of ferns, their GPS location, and whether the fronds were fertile or infertile. Fronds are the leaves of the ferns. Because of the drought, we found that these fronds had been shorter than in past years. Not only that, but the number of fronds themselves had gone down. The most interesting thing however, was the decrease in spore count. The spores are called sori, and they are yellow or orange dots all over the fronds. Fronds that are not fertile do not have sori.

Redwoods at Pepperwood (photo by Richard Morgenstein)

Our findings varied from plot to plot. Some plots had one or two ferns, where others had as many as ten ferns. Each plot was different, and each one contained different information on the sword ferns. Our research required us to scale steep hills and push our way through bushes to get to the plots, but it was worth it. Our data was given to Emily Burns, the research director at Save the Redwoods League, who used the data to contribute to the information they had already collected at other sites. Our research was also the first “citizen-science effort to completely install and census Fern Watch plots independently.” It was hard work, but it was extremely rewarding. Not only was the research helpful to the redwood scientists, it was fun as well. I had a great time working with the ferns and redwoods.

My Experience Using iNaturalist.org

By Sarah Catching, TeenNat Intern

June 22, 2015

Sarah Catching leans in for a closeup photo

I love spiders. All other arthropods included, but mostly spiders. The only problem is most people don’t love spiders. It’s rare for me to find someone to talk to about spiders I used to just keep it all to myself, recording what I found and leaving it at that. That is, until I was introduced to iNaturalist.org during my TeenNat summer internship. I think the best way to describe my discovery of iNaturalist.org is as a window opening: I knew there must be other spider nerds out there like me, but I just didn’t know how to find them. iNaturalist.org is like social media for scientists and being someone who isn’t a scientist (yet) it is so cool to think that I have the opportunity to not only view the findings of professionals, but to also put my own discoveries out there. 

Uploading data to iNaturalist.org

During TeenNat we had the daily recordings that we would put up onto iNat and we all found ourselves with anywhere from 20 to over 500 entries at the end of August. It was so satisfying seeing my findings over the two months, ranging from beetles to lizards and, of course, spiders. It seemed like I was receiving almost daily notifications that someone had seen or identified  something of mine which was not only educational but also super exciting because what I was putting out was being seen. My only fear was that after TeenNat was over I would forget iNaturalist.org, that I would forget to put my entries in, and I would lose that connection with the iNaturalist.org community.

But, the thing is, I couldn’t forget iNaturalist.org and it certainly didn’t forget me. Every time I saw a bug I would race to find my little blue camera and my field guides. Of course, as life kept moving faster I found myself with less time to play outside looking for new creatures, although I still ran across the occasional house spider that I simply had to share with the rest of the world. Every spider is special and adorable to me and deserves recognition.

Spider photographed by Sarah Catching

So now,  here I am a year after my TeenNat experience, still logging entries into iNaturalist.org and going back to Pepperwoord whenever I am able. A part of my heart lives in Pepperwood, and being on iNaturalist.org is almost like being back with the rest of the group riding in the van to Turtle Pond, hiking up hills, counting Sword Ferns, and finding scorpions. iNaturalist.org is my connection to others who share my passion for spiders and insects, but more than that, it is my portal back to last summer. 

Sarah out on the preserve with field notebook

Another spider photographed by Sarah Catching

Looking Under the Log - Dr. Vance Vredenburg on Amphibians

We're excited to host Dr. Vance Vredenburg of San Francisco State University for our next Discover Nature lecture on Amphibians!

Amphibians, Amphibian Decline, and Restoration
Friday, August 14, 2015 
7pm lecture, no reservations necessary
$10 suggested donation, students free
Click here for more info.

We hope to see you there! 

---------------------------------

Dr. Vance Vredenburg

Looking Under the Log
Dr. Vredenburg Researches Frogs, Newts, and Salamanders with an Eye Towards Conservation

Responses by Dr. Vance Vredenburg

1) What got you interested in amphibians in the first place?  
I wanted to conduct research on a group of animals where I felt I could have conservation impact. They are so threatened that it seemed to make sense. I also wanted to work in a system where I could directly handle the animals (mammals and birds were out!) and I’ve always been fascinated by amphibians.

All three species of California's newts are found
at Pepperwood! Photo taken at Pepperwood by
Ken-ichi Ueda of iNaturalist.org

2) Your work seems to span the globe. How are challenges to amphibians in Northern California similar or different than the challenges face in other regions? 
In many ways they are similar. A pandemic disease is affecting amphibians in similar ways in Northern California, Chile, Spain, China, and even Palau and humans are the cause of the pandemic. 

3) Can you tell us a little about AmphibiaWeb? What prompted you to start this on-line web portal? 
AmphibiaWeb is an online amphibian conservation portal. I started it with David Wake (a professor at UC Berkeley) when I was a graduate student back in 1998. It was created and is maintained by volunteers interested in saving the world’s amphibians. It provides information (e.g. conservation status, photos, range maps, etc.) on every known species of amphibian and gets over 7.3 million successful queries per year.

Newt photographed by 2014 TeenNat intern Mario Balitbit.

4) What can average community members do to help promote the survival of amphibian species? 
Become educated about the species that live in our natural world, sometimes even in our front yards (e.g. California slender salamanders are the most common amphibian in California), help spread the word that releasing amphibians purchased in the pet trade should never be done, and become involved in a conservation organization. 

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Dr. Vredenburg was raised in Mexico and the United States. His scientific training began as an undergraduate at the University of California Santa Barbara where he worked on ecological research projects in coastal California, Alaska, the Caribbean, and Antarctica. His current research focuses on the ecology, evolution and conservation of amphibians including the ecology of emerging infectious amphibian disease, the role of the skin microbiome in health and disease, and the role of climate change and behavior on disease dynamics. Dr. Vredenburg the co-founder of AmphibiaWeb an online conservation resource for the world’s amphibians. His research seeks to understand how some populations of frogs survive epidemics. Dr. Vredenburg is a research associate at the California Academy of Sciences and will be presenting on the conservation and threats to native amphibians. Learn more at the Vredenburg Lab website.

Grappling with the Drought

By Lisa Micheli, PhD, President & CEO

Yesterday I talked to a man about getting a fake lawn.  I now look out my home office window rather guiltily at the horseshoe shaped natural green carpet in my backyard. I know my family wants a place to play, yet this grassy patch will use more water over the summer than a pool of the same size. And we are on the hook to reduce our water use by 25% compared to last year because of the drought. So I am actually considering pulling the whole thing up, laying down some gravel, and covering it with the equivalent of a backyard "toupee."  Meanwhile, I'm committed to letting any trees just die if they can't make it through the summer without irrigation.

More lawns in our area are left to the seasonal transition from
green to brown undergone by the surrounding hillsides. Above:
view from Pepperwood's Dwight Center, photo by Lisa Micheli.

Given that my work at Pepperwood exposes me to a lot of data about where water is used and perhaps wasted in our region, I'm acutely aware of the fact that outdoor irrigation of rural residential yards like mine are probably one of the chief culprits of water waste, and where we could achieve the greatest savings without compromising drinking water or agricultural water supplies.  And that all the water we consume without recycling creates a deficit somewhere in our natural system that won't be refilled until the next time we get a good old-fashioned rainy season.

This is the kind of nexus between personal choices and community resilience being forced upon us in the face of the drought. In our region, water awareness is now at an all time high.  For example, next Wednesday I've been asked to present on the drought and what we can do about it at my town's local environment commission, then Friday at a conference dedicated to the watershed of the Napa Valley.  This is a more and more typical week for me as our community ponders two questions: "how bad will it really get?," which requires a crystal ball to answer, and "what am I willing to give up?," which requires some serious soul searching on the part of each one of us.  I notice most people opt to talk more about the former than the latter.

Above: TBC3 co-chairs Dr. Lisa Micheli of Pepperwood and Dr. David
Ackerly of UC Berkeley at one of Pepperwood's weather stations.

Pepperwood's TBC3 research team is using computer models to explore how much "droughtier" our future may be as a result of climate change. What the models show is what you intuitively know: warmer weather helps to dry things out. So as temperatures continue to rise, the effect is something like aiming a blow dryer on high heat at the Earth.  The result is increasing the total amount of evaporation, or where plants are growing, evapotranspiration (the combination of direct evaporation plus water used by the plants).  For the North Bay, all of the models, even the ones with significantly higher than normal rainfall, suggest that on average an additional 3 inches (or so) of rain per year will be vaporized due to higher temperatures than compared to today.  In some places that amounts to an additional 10% of incoming rainfall being lost due to warming.

So this means that water, the most precious of perhaps of all resources for life, is getting only ever more precious.  I get inspired by those cultural creatives like our friends at Daily Acts who are figuring out how to make water conservation and recycling both fun and social, rather than an overwhelmingly weighty moral conundrum.  So besides tackling the lawn, I am finally going to do what I've been planning to do for years but never got around to - and that is put in a laundry-to-landscape system.  What the heck is that you may ask?  It's a simple plumbing solution to take the water used by my washing machine and route it directly to irrigate my front yard.  And this year that's all the roses are going to get (we stopped irrigating the front lawn years ago, letting it go "rough"). Oh - and I'm ordering a load of mulch to help keep as much water in the ground this summer as possible.

So what are your water-wise solutions? How can you make it fun and get your neighbors to help or even try it out themselves? How much easier will we all breathe and sleep when we are successful in leaving smaller footprints on the planet?

- Lisa Micheli, PhD, President & CEO

Exploring Badgers with Dr. Jessie Quinn

We're excited to host Dr. Jessie Quinn of Great Ecology for our next Discover Nature lecture on Badgers!

American badger (Taxidea taxus), photo by 
Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife

Digging Dynamos: 
Badgers of Coastal California
Friday, May 1st, 2015 
7pm lecture, no reservations necessary
Free, with donations greatly appreciated
Click here for more info.

Learn about the mysterious and charismatic American Badger as Dr. Quinn shares her 4 years of work with UC Davis studying badger ecology and population distribution across California. 

We hope you'll join us for her lecture on May 1st! 

In the meantime, brush up on your badger knowledge by reading our latest blog post below. Responses by Dr. Jessie Quinn.
 

European badger (Meles meles)

1) What is your background and how did you get involved studying badgers?  

My background is in wildlife ecology, which actually stemmed from a love of the outdoors, and from a hobby of birdwatching I developed as an undergraduate at UC Santa Barbara. I spent several years after college working on bird projects for various agencies. I eventually decided to pursue graduate studies at UC Davis in a lab with two potential projects I could work on: one involving invasive black rat impacts on native bird and small mammal populations on the Channel Islands, and another investigating black rat predation on songbird nests in riparian forests in the Central Valley. I worked a little on both of those until an opportunity came along to develop a project investigating the invasive Small Indian mongoose in Puerto Rico.  That project focused on a number of potential predators of the endangered Puerto Rican Parrot, and mongooses in particular as both a parrot predator, and as a vector and reservoir of rabies.  So, I ended up doing my M.S. research on mongoose spatial and social behavior in the context of management of those issues.  I found working with those feisty little carnivores interesting, so I looked toward planning a Ph.D. project on mongooses or a similar species at UCD.  My M.S. advisor was returning to her native Australia, so I found a new advisor in Dr. Rosie Woodroffe, an internationally recognized expert on European badgers in the context of bovine tuberculosis management in the U.K.  She was interested in the conservation of California carnivores, and asked me if anyone had done anything on American badgers.  It turned out that the California Department of Fish and Wildlife (CDFW) had some concern about how California's badgers were doing, but there were hardly any data on their behavior, habitat use, or even range extent. The sparse data included one sighting survey conducted by CDFW in 1986, and before that, a compilation of trapping locations compiled by Joseph Grinnell in the 1920s; and then a telemetry study of 2 badgers for 1 month in the Santa Monica mountains in the 1990s.  Given that sizable knowledge gap, CDFW was willing to fund a study as part of their Resource Assessment Program in partnership with the Wildlife Health Center at UCD assessing the conservation status of the American badger in California, so I decided I'd give it a go.

American badger (Taxidea taxus), photo by 
US Fish and Wildlife Service

2) What are some of the things that make badgers unique and interesting? 
There are so many unique and interesting things about badgers!  They are fossorial carnivores, which is unique, and their phylogeny is very interesting, too… American badgers are the only species in their genus and subfamily.  Same with honey badgers.  The rest of the badgers in Europe and Asia are more closely related to each other, but are also all in different genera.  Of course, their defensive mechanisms—famously their bad attitude—but less famously, their physiology (loose, tough skin, incredible digging ability from their front leg and claw morphology).  Also, they have such an attractive and unique face, which likely evolved to communicate a threat to potential predators.  All a predator needed to see was that little aposematic face filling a burrow hole, coupled with bared teeth and a fierce hissing, and it didn't bother wasting its time pursuing such problematic prey.  

3) Are badgers mostly solitary or do they live in groups?  
American badgers are solitary outside of the breeding season. Only Meles badgers (European and Asian badgers) are truly social and can occupy huge, communal dens for generations.    

4) What traits have helped badgers survive from an evolutionary perspective? Competitively amongst other carnivores their size, badgers occupy a unique ecological niche as a carnivore of the open prairies and deserts that specializes on digging up fossorial rodents.  And of course, the traits I mentioned above (attitude, face, skin characteristics) have long protected them from larger carnivores. Badgers evolved alongside potential predators that included Mountain lions, Grizzly bears and Gray wolves that ranged across most of the Great Plains and western North America before European colonization.  When cornered without a burrow nearby, badgers go on the offensive pretty aggressively.  This deters even those larger predators that don't want to risk the likely injury associated with trying to kill a badger.  And if they do go for the badger, they will find that its skin is so loose, they'll have a hard time keeping a hold of it… when grabbed by the haunches or back, a badger can literally turn around inside its skin and bite the predator in the face.  Badgers' aggressive behavior is necessary because their legs are evolved for digging, not climbing trees or running fast, and they occupy very open habitat without places to hide.

5) What role do badgers play in the ecosystems they call home?  
Badgers move a significant volume of soil on a day to day basis, and thus significantly affect the very structure of the landscape.  Studies in Idaho have documented the significance of badger burrows in the sagebrush-steppe community, and suggest their likely important impacts on soil and ecosystem processes in that habitat.  Additionally, the overturned soil can serve as a colonization site for plants, and the actual burrows are used by numerous other species; including burrowing owls, kit foxes, coyotes, snakes, and ground squirrels.  

6) What is the history of badgers in the Sonoma County area - were they once more prevalent than they are today? If so, are there any steps being taken to encourage population growth?  

Illustration from Popular Science Monthly circa 1891

Sonoma County provides perfect habitat for badgers- oak woodlands, grasslands, and sage scrub.  However, badgers tend to live at low population densities (depending on their prey species distribution), and are somewhat territorial, so that would have limited population size.  But generally, they were probably much more common than they are today.  Badgers were trapped at high densities at the turn of the century for their fur, and because they present a (perhaps perceived) risk to cattle and horses, they were controlled as a pest in rangelands.  Additionally, badgers seem to be especially sensitive to the effects of habitat fragmentation and development.  They don't appear to do well where there are busy highways, and may also be suffer secondary poisoning from ground squirrel, gopher, and coyote control efforts.  Regarding conservation efforts, badgers are listed at the state level as Species of Special Concern.  As of yet, that hasn't meant much in terms of active population management, probably because so little has been known about badger distribution and abundance.  In fact, badgers are still a game species with a designated season, and they can be taken at any time without a permit for depredation.  However, they have to be considered under the CEQA regulatory process (for any state project, or projects that require a state permit that may impact natural resources) due to their listing status, so we do see project proponents that seek to minimize impacts to badgers when they are known to be present at a project site.  However, the challenges that remain for project managers are 1) establishing whether or not badgers are "at" a site, as they move constantly and widely; and 2) figuring out how to avoid badgers when it is hard to predict where they will pop up next.

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Dr. Jessie Quinn is a Senior Ecologist at Great Ecology and has over 15 years of experience. She has a strong background studying habitat use, developing species occurrence models, and leading multi-agency studies supporting wildlife management and habitat planning. She develops and conducts habitat and ecological risk assessments, develops standardized methodologies and novel technical tools for quantitative analysis, and oversees fieldwork protocols. Dr. Quinn specializes in Habitat Equivalency Analysis (HEA) for Natural Resource Damage Assessments (NRDA), wetland functional analysis, experimental design and analysis, and inventory and monitoring methods. Dr. Quinn holds a Bachelor’s degree in Ecology from University of California, Santa Barbara, as well as a Master’s degree and Doctorate in Ecology and Conservation from University of California, Davis. - See more at the Great Ecology website.